SuperDrive in Mini

[U2Rules!]

I will be buying a Mac Mini in the next month. I want a DVD burner....Should I get a superdrive in my mini or buy and external dvd burner??? Anyone have a mini with superdrive?? Is it OK? Thanks.

 

[feakbeak]

I will be buying a Mac Mini in the next month. I want a DVD burner....Should I get a superdrive in my mini or buy and external dvd burner??? Anyone have a mini with superdrive?? Is it OK? Thanks.

I bought the Mini with the superdrive. I have burned many a CD with it and played DVDs, but never burned a DVD yet. I don't own a MiniDV cam and haven't done any DVD backups yet. I'm used to my 48x CD burner on my PC and the Mini is definitely slower for burning CDs as it's only an 16x CD burner. Still, I don't burn discs that often anyway so it's not a big deal to me. It's nice being able to burn most any medium I need and have it built-in to the Mac Mini.

If you are going to be doing some serious burning I would get a nicer/faster external burner that does DL as well. For casual burning I think it's nice to have the drive built-in.

 

[U2Rules!]

Thanks feakbeak. Looking at your sig, you have the same setup I will be getting. Got my 2001fp last week. How do you like your set-up?

 

[yellow]

AFAIK, you can't use iDVD and an external burner. I suggest blowing the money on an internal.

 

[feakbeak]

The 2001FP is a great display, especially for the money. The Mac Mini seems to run it just fine despite the under-powered 32 MB GPU. The only time I've found my Mac Mini to really slow down was when playing around with iMovie adding special effects. I don't use iMovie often, as I said, no MiniDV to be importing and editting - I just wanted to try it out. I also don't try to run any intensive games on my Mini. For any and all daily tasks (email/browsing/iTunes/iCal/IM/etc) and some moderate image editing the Mac Mini and 2001FP work great.

Expose and Dashboard would probably fly in and out more smoothly on a more powerful machine but I don't find it to be choppy or too sluggish on my Mini. The only strong recommendation I would make for the Mini is to be sure to get 1 GB of RAM - 512 MB minimum. Also, it's much cheaper to do the 1 GB yourself.

 

[deebster]

AFAIK, you can't use iDVD and an external burner. I suggest blowing the money on an internal.

I understand that you can now.

At the very least you could save the iDVD project as a disk image and burn it on a superdrive-equipped Mac.

For my money the Mini's superdrive is not worth getting. It burns at only 4x compared to externals going up to 16x.